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Rebel without a pulse

This article is more than 16 years old
Gay zombies have rights too, says Matthew Hays

A young zombie named Otto wanders the streets of Berlin, a despondent and lonely outsider. He auditions for the director of a low-budget zombie film, in the hopes of hiding his zombie status from the rest of the world. Otto assumes that if he's playing a zombie in a movie, no one will catch on that he really is one. It's already odd enough - how many movies have you seen that empathise with the existential difficulties of the zombie lifestyle? - but there's a further difference from the standard zombie-wants-to-eat-your-brains movie: Otto is gay. Otto, aka Up With Dead People, directed by Toronto-based controversialist Bruce LaBruce, which premiered at this week's Sundance film festival, is - yes - the world's first gay zombie movie.

Given that gay film-makers have a long history with the genre - from James Whale to Clive Barker to Chucky creator Don Mancini - and the fact that much of the gay community has been consumed by a blood-borne epidemic for close on 30 years, it's a wonder a gay zombie film hasn't come along before. But LaBruce says his inspiration had less to do with HIV infection and more to do with that staple of the zombie sub-genre, consumerism in a postmodern state. "Vampires were the go-to metaphor for Aids in the 1980s," says LaBruce. "Films like The Hunger were big. I like the idea of zombies, because they just wander around aimlessly, their souls gone, mindless consumers. And gays can be very zombie-like when it comes to sex. They wander the halls of bathhouses like zombies and cruise parks at night like the living dead. I like the idea of the zombies as these misfits, outsiders who are misunderstood and shunned by the rest of the population."

LaBruce, the director behind such "porn punk" films as Hustler White and Skin Flick, says part of the inspiration also came from a former boyfriend who is a Shia Muslim. "They are a very lugubrious bunch, the Shia. Very death-obsessed. They spend the first six weeks of the new year wearing black and mourning the martyrdom of the prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein. My ex said that his priest told everyone in the mosque, no matter what age, to go and pick out their shroud. My ex also said he thought he was dead all the time. So I thought it would make a fun movie."

With Otto, LaBruce hopes to take a different perspective to the mainstream zombie tradition. "In movies like I Am Legend or 28 Days Later, the zombies are entirely unsympathetic. I like the idea of the zombies being these rebels and outsiders who actually have some legitimacy. More recently, the need to hate the Other, to have the bad guys painted with one broad brush, has been great. If you look back at Frankenstein in 1931, in that film, the monster becomes a very sympathetic figure. It's the townsfolk, an angry, thoughtless mob, who are portrayed quite negatively."

LaBruce is keen to see the response Otto will get when it screens with a midnight Sundance crowd. "There have been a lot of zombie movies, so when people hear 'gay zombie film' they either get totally excited or are totally jaded. Some people think they're played out, others think they're ripe for a comeback. But I'm trying to do something entirely different with this movie. I've made a melancholy gay zombie film."

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